Maximize your Alexa Routines – Scheduled Volume Control for Echo Devices
Alexa Routines are very cool. I use Home Assistant, but even if you are just using stock Amazon Echo products, you can start to accomplish a lot of automation with their User Interface. This is where Routines really shine. You can schedule all sorts of stuff for Alexa to say or do. You can have her turn up the lights in the morning, wait 10 minutes and then adjust the volume and start giving you the weather and traffic. Really the possibilities are too many to list and are growing each day. In my last video, I talked about how I used YAML scripting to control the volume of my Chromecast Audios throughout the day. Today I will show you how I use Routines to manage the Echo devices’ volume to match.
How do we create Alexa Routines?
For all Routine creations and edits, you must use the mobile app. Routines are not available via voice or the web app yet. I do wish that there were some more variables for time such as sunset or sunrise. I would use these for my volume control most likely but right now I am sticking to 9AM to 9PM. At 9AM, I have Routines set the volume of my echo device to 6. The volume scale is 1 to 10 so 6 is a good level for our smart home. Then at 9PM, we have the volume set to 3 so that it doesn’t wake the house if some sort of alert comes over the devices. This combined with Whisper Mode do a great job of keeping things normalized. We do this same schedule everyday but you could easily change it to suit your needs.
Check out the video below for the complete details and consider subscribing to the channel if you haven’t already.
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Happy Automating!